Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  It occurred to Fred now that, with his preparations for Florida over the weekend, his times at the hospital hadn’t overlapped with hers as much as usual. And that the times they had, she’d seemed elusive. More than once, she’d taken the opportunity of leaving shortly after he’d arrived.

  “Have you told anyone else about this?” he asked, the words barely getting out.

  “Yeah, I told the group.” She smiled. “They went out and tried it. We’re all doing it now.”

  “You’re all doing Reiki,” his voice rose, “on the streets?”

  “That’s what we’re calling it. Street Reiki.” She pronounced the phrase with a self-deprecatingly theatrical emphasis. “Rudolf says it makes us sound like guerilla warriors.”

  “Rudolph.” He thought. Gandalf. “The bearded guy?”

  The scaffolding ended and they were back out in the blaze. At the corner of Houston Street, they stopped, waiting for the traffic light next to half a dozen garbage bags piled around a trash can. The summer mob began massing at the curb, multihued shopping bags brimming with shoes and clothes and electronics and food and health supplements. The scent of suntan lotion rising off all those bare arms and legs overwhelmed even the exhaust fumes and tincture of heated garbage, putting Fred in mind of a day at the beach. The only vortex he could see here was a whirlwind of money and pheromones. The only hint of imbalance was the giant African child passing on a bus ad for a charity. If anywhere, the vortex seemed to be out there, out in the world at large—wars, crises, famines, rabid ideologies, environmental horrors wheeling round and round them without touching them at all. The city, this summer, seemed fine. Better than fine. Better than ever. Though maybe this very appearance of health could be considered cause for suspicion. Like too rosy cheeks, or a sudden absence of pain.

  “So you’re all just … walking around like this, now?” he asked.

  “We try to make at least five stops.”

  “Why five?”

  “I was thinking about the Muslims. How they pray five times a day. How much commitment it shows.”

  A slight archness had snuck into her tone. She sounded a bit like a football coach, giving grudging credit to an opposing team.

  This is all your fault, he grumbled to Inner George.

  My fault? Inner George snapped back. Who’s the idiot who kept me breathing?

  Who’s the moron who wouldn’t go back to chemo?

  Who’s the dumbfuck who flushed my company down the toilet, eh, Freddo?

  Stop fucking calling me that.

  Freddo, Fred meant. Not dumbfuck. That one he’d cop to.

  The light changed, and the crowd swept him and his mother across. A few feet past the south corner, she weaved her way over to the display window of a Pottery Barn, then turned back and faced the street.

  “I’m feeling the storm here,” she said quietly, nervous or excited, her sunglasses catching the light as she looked this way and that. “You can try it with me, if you want.”

  Before he could even think to panic she was doing it—her eyes shut behind those lenses; her face tilted upward; her arms higher than last time (that, apparently, had been just a demonstration), stretched toward the sky.

  Fred gaped, then glanced around. A construction barricade and a vendor’s table full of NYPD-logoed women’s underwear took up part of the sidewalk, so that the pedestrian traffic had to skew around them, regarding them with puzzlement or annoyance. Behind them, on a low ledge beneath the window, a bum in a Hawaiian shirt and a Superman cap slept with a bent cigarette in his mouth. Fred locked onto that red S, the image of George and the sandbox flashing brightly through his mind. And instantly out, banished by someone’s swinging handbag. His mother’s hands, he saw, trembled a bit more than usual, but her expression was growing less tense, more lax and inward, the way she’d looked last week holding her hands over his temples. She wasn’t a large person, standing about a head shorter than him; he worried someone would inadvertently knock her over. To protect her, though in retrospect he was probably just making matters worse, he got in front of her, so as to serve as a kind of barrier reef against the human tide. He fumbled for some way of diverting attention from the two of them. At first he tried to make it look like they were both squinting to see something up in the sky, but he had to stop this because other people started turning fearfully and looking, for low-flying aircraft, no doubt, causing more of a disturbance than before. He then stepped to the corner and fished a copy of the Daily News out of a trash can—

  Are you AGONY

  playing?

  —and stepped back and opened it, pretending to be so entranced by the deadly Bronx fire or the paper’s promotional Scratch n’ Match game that he was glued to the spot. But this only seemed to make people jostle him more angrily. He had almost succeeded in losing himself in an article about how the UN had been deemed a firetrap when the paper was battered by some passing elbow like a sail in a gale.

  What was he supposed to do now?

  Inner George didn’t bother offering an opinion. Though he did chuckle when Fred closed his eyes as well, holding his palms out in front of him.

  The first thing Fred felt was fright, the nightmarish sensation of driving blind. He could sense the impatient bodies coming toward him, swerving around, buffeting his arms. He could smell the sharp chemical odor of their perfumes, hear the thin, percussive chains of drumbeats in their earphones, the fragments of their conversations about people he didn’t know but might as well have known—someone who was so nasty, someone who didn’t know at all but acted like he did, someone else named Ritchie who couldn’t believe it. Fred wasn’t even trying to do Reiki—the prospect of engaging in yet one more act of make-believe after the helmet session and visualization today made him want to scoop out his brain and mash it like Play-Doh. He was only trying to draw fire away from his mother. It was like being conveyed through a car wash without a car. In fearful elation, he stood rigid against it all, letting the noises and odors and bodies begin to whittle him down. In an aeon, he’d find himself remade—a gaunt, rarefied hoodoo of a man.

  “WAKE UP MOTHA FUCKIN’ SLEEPY HEAD!”

  Some kid shouted this in his ear as he passed, his friends laughing. Fred didn’t open his eyes. The sense of chaos around him redoubled with each passing second—the weave of voices, the rumble of engines, the press of bodies, a steady jerking at his arm—

  “We should go, honey.”

  Fred blinked. The bum was snoozing away, the corners of his chapped lips serenely upturned. Holly’s hand was on Fred’s forearm. She was looking up at him with a questioning smile. He forced a smile in return, and once more was following her south. It was somehow a shock to see it all again—the motley canyon of buildings, the bobbing heads; everything seemed to be both here and not here, bleaching into the too bright light.

  “So what did you feel?” she asked.

  He’d certainly felt a lot of things, but nothing, he assured himself, demonstrably supernatural, which he assumed was what she was asking about. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t really know what to do.”

  “You don’t have to. The Reiki knows. Just say Reiki in your head three times, Reiki Reiki Reiki, and let it flow however it wants.”

  She seemed calmer now, recharged by the successful healing of Broadway and Houston. They walked on, crossing Prince Street in a row of people who just happened to be swinging their arms in parallel. Three times, he thought. Like Dorothy, clicking her ruby slippers. The image led him to that proud red S on its yellow shield, first on the bum’s cap, then on George’s chest in that childhood sandbox. Which in turn made Fred’s stomach lift an inch. They made way for a harried Asian woman pushing one of those double strollers. All he saw of its occupants before looking away were four wide, flat eyes and a pair of pouts. Enough to make him queasier still. Holly tracked them as they went by, looking warmed by the sight.

  “Mom,” he said, the air around him going foamy and prickly, “did you make George a
nd me Superman costumes when we were kids?”

  “You remember that? Yeah,” she softly sang, “I made them for you guys for Halloween. We have pictures, somewhere.”

  He thought he could recall the feel of that little cape against the backs of his arms, the thickness and heat of the ungainly red-and-yellow patch over his heart.

  “Why would you make us the exact same costume?”

  “It wasn’t up to me. You both wanted that one. You two wore them everywhere. For weeks.”

  “We did?” he asked. “For weeks?”

  She laughed. “You refused to wear anything else.”

  “Why did you let us wear those things for weeks?”

  “You liked them,” she said.

  The glare on the street, he admitted to himself, was beyond anything natural. It must have been an aftereffect from the session. It brought back even more that feeling of the life review. As though not just he but everyone out here were in that final minute of brainlife, every consciousness being dipped in this orgasmic frenzy of color and motion and noise one last time before it would all get whisked away. He thought of himself and George in those blue-and-red costumes, pulling apart the shovel. He thought of George in that blue-and-red shirt in the department store, the two of them starting with shock. They’d wandered around after that, he and George, first through the aisles of the store, next through the streets, mostly griping about their significant others. They passed a lesbian bar on West 12th and George steered them inside. In the course of ordering drinks, George started talking to two women, one lanky and freckled, the other round and busty, both of them sunburned. The women turned out to be Army, awaiting redeployment to the Green Zone. They sat with George and Fred awhile, drunk and getting drunker. George asked them if gay women nagged or if that was just a straight-woman thing, and they said they nagged each other half to death. He asked them about the war, but they wouldn’t talk about it, said they didn’t want to depress themselves. Instead, they went on in wistful tones about the first Gulf War, which they hadn’t been in but wished they had; how in that one there’d been no need to shoot the enemy, barely a need to bomb them; how American tanks had had plows on the front and just plowed the poor fools under, and all you’d see afterwards were tank tracks in the sand.

  By the end of the night, the four of them were hunched together on a bench by the Hudson, sipping beer through straws from bagged bottles. The women shared a cigarette, their heads leaned together sleepily. George was still riled, going on about how Jill secretly didn’t like him anymore, how she was just sticking around hoping he’d go back to the way he used to be.

  “That’s crazy,” Fred said.

  “Crazy? Crazy of me?” George said.

  “Of her.”

  “Right. It’s crazy.”

  “Totally,” Fred said, though in truth he was egging George on for precisely the same reason, because he wanted the old George back—Supergeorge—the one who pontificated and scratched his head and waved his fingers in the air as he talked; who struck up conversations with strangers and walked around half the night; who, at the very least, wanted to be Fred’s friend. They hadn’t hung out like this in a long time.

  “That’s the problem with relationships,” George was saying. “It’s a contract. You agree to be some unchanging caricature of yourself. To act the same way all the time. Never to change. It’s counter-evolutionary. How can anything new and good come into your life, if you’re holding on to something that doesn’t exist anymore?”

  George sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  “Exactly,” Fred said. And because George looked at him to see whether he was really serious or just drunkenly parroting him, and because, too, Fred wanted to one-up him, he added, “I’m through with Mel.”

  “No you’re not,” George said.

  “Am too,” Fred insisted.

  “Am too,” the lanky one repeated in a drawl, to her lover’s snorting laugh.

  And then Fred staggered back to the Zeckendorf, climbed into his warm bed with Mel, and promptly made up. And George went home and asked for a divorce. There weren’t many nights on the town together after that.

  Fred and his mother were standing on the southwest corner of Canal Street. She’d led them to the granite wall of what looked to have once been a bank, and was now a Payless shoe store, with a vendor’s alcove full of Bob Marley T-shirts, plastic bongs, pirated DVDs, and smoking incense. A hot dog cart and a shish kebob cart shimmered in their own heat by the curb. The too-bright light he’d been seeing had faded back into the usual everyday impossible city.

  “Do you have to lift your hands?” he asked. “Can’t you just close your eyes, or do something less conspicuous?”

  She was looking around at nothing, at the air in front of her. He tried to imagine the lashing waves of that out-of-control vortex she was presumably feeling.

  “I tried that,” she said. “It just doesn’t work the same.”

  Reiki issues aside, he thought he could understand this. There wouldn’t have been the same fearful thrill, free-falling surrender. It was a leap of faith, out of the imagination and into the world. There was no way he could stop her. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to.

  “So what’s the street feel like when it’s clear?” he asked.

  Behind those shaded lenses, he could see her eyes sparkling with something, tears or triumph, or both.

  “To me, it feels like a baby.” She smiled. “Sleeping in my arms.”

  He looked off down Broadway, blinking, into the kaleidoscopic streams of sunglassed heads and yellow taxi hulls. By the time he looked back, she had brought her hands up, just in time for every single person on the roofdeck of a passing tourist bus to gawk at her, a few snapping pictures.

  He shut his eyes, reached for the sky—this time, to his surprise, looking forward to it.

  And it’s back again, the glare, stronger than ever. It rebounds off the low white drop ceiling, blanches the dull red linoleum tacking to these checkered shoes. The community room is a glowing netherworld, a place of inversions, where excited children have been replaced by hostile seniors, or hostile to Fred, at any rate. He pulls an endless string of scarves from Vartan’s mouth, and a long-eared, leftward-listing man lasers Fred with blistery eyes. He glues Vartan’s feet to the floor, and a bag-jawed lady in thick glasses emits a rasping sigh. The audience murmurs with approval as Vartan glowers over Fred with his metal rings. They suck at their dentures as Fred maneuvers the rings over Vartan’s head and binds his arms. The only exception is today’s birthday boy, front and center, a radiant shrunken apple of a man who’s just turned a hundred. He smiles impartially and perpetually, a toothless, lipless smile, his eyes above it like unbuttoned buttons peeking through their wrinkled holes, a smile that would reassure Fred but for the nagging suspicion it might remain there unchanged were Fred and his father to stop pouring fake pitchers into newspaper cones and instead douse each other with gasoline and light a match.

  Fred is supposed to be the one to go into the wooden box (they can’t very well crate up the centenarian), and Vartan is supposed to make him disappear, then feel remorseful; but Vartan changes the script. Responding to some new dramatic insight, Vartan’s movements have been becoming more hesitant, as if he’s discovered his bones to be made of shale. He’s playing an older man than he was previously; no less angry, if anything, more, but with a helpless, pathetic aspect to the rage. Instead of tricking and kicking Fred into the box, Vartan stops him with a palm, and begins lowering himself to hands and knees. He looks so frail Fred instinctively reaches out a hand to help, but, proud in his defeat, Vartan waves him away and crawls inside.

  Fred spins and disappears his father, spins and fails to reappear him, worrying about Vartan in that tight, enclosed space designed for a child. The audience is picking up on Fred’s distress, nodding as if it’s about time, about time this no-good, disrespectful son—this son who very likely has not visited his old man in the old folks’ home n
early as often as he should—finally feels remorse. Then Fred is spinning again, the room whirling, those old faces and pastel bulletin board flyers for blood drives, bingo games, self-defense lessons warping and slipping around the hole where George should have been across from him like water around a rock. There’s no flash-powder bomb—which, after all, might have stopped a frail heart out there—but the room is so bright now that Fred almost thinks one must have gone off, as the door falls open, and Vartan, a white-haired, white-tuxed whiteness within the whiteness emerges. Slowly, dazedly, Vartan rises, blinking and looking about. They embrace, clinging to each other as if they’d just seen a roomful of ghosts, as the ghosts themselves watch them, touched, or perhaps just unsure if it’s over, until the birthday boy raises his parchment hands and issues a papery clap.

  The two of them sat in the van after loading it in silence.

  “What the fuck was that?” Vartan muttered.

  Though the brightness was gone, Fred’s dreamlike feeling that he was dead, or that everyone was dead, hadn’t entirely worn off.

  “Weird show,” he agreed. “But seemed like it went OK.”

  Really, it had gone better than OK. Once the audience had started clapping, it had become clear they’d been not only entertained but moved. Fred, too, had been moved, and a little disturbed, by his father’s performance—Vartan seemed to have discovered a whole new depth to the part. And moved or not, the birthday boy had seemed happy enough to receive his requisite stuffed toucan, clutching it a little obscenely to his blanketed lap and gazing up at Fred and Vartan with those tiny nutbrown eyes.

  “Whole new market, maybe,” Fred added.

  “They’re not supposed to root for the washed-up old man,” Vartan said. “That’s not the point.” He was strangely agitated, patting down his tux jacket, in search of his pipe. “Shoot me before it comes to parking me in one of those places, OK?”